LC lol 



University Bulletin 

New Series, Vol. XV No. 5 



THE PARADOX OF OXFORD 

By 
PAUL ELMER MORE 

Editor of The Nation 



From the Proceedings of the Michigan Schoolmasters' Club and Classical Conference 
held at Ann Arbor, Michigan, April 4, 19 1 3 



HUMANISTIC PAPERS, SECOND SERIES, III 



Reprint from the School Review, June, 1 9 1 3 



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THE PARADOX OF OXFORD 

By 

PAUL ELMER MORE 

Editor of The Nation 



From the Proceedings of the Michigan Schoolmasters' Club and Classical Conference 
held at Ann Arbor, Michigan, April 4, 1 9 1 3 



HUMANISTIC PAPERS, SECOND SERIES, III 



Reprint from the School Review, June, 1 9 1 3 



b 



. vri 



The Publication of this Bulletin was Authorized by the Executive Board 
of the Graduate Department 



pro j] 1914 



THE PARADOX OF OXFORD 1 



PAUL E. MORE 

New York City 



It is commonly agreed that no other city in Great Britain lays 
so potent a spell on the visitor as Oxford. The gardens of the sister 
university along the Cam may catch the charm of an English 
summer more entrancingly; Edinburgh, with her crown of hills, 
and her cavernous wynds, may be more picturesque; London, with 
her pride of empire, her spoils of art, her web of human triumphs and 
despair, may be more appalling to the imagination; but there is 
something in the aspect of the crowded, cloistered colleges of Oxford 
that penetrates more deeply into the mind of the observer and 
leaves him not quite the same man as before. Such at least was 
my experience last summer when I visited the town for the first 
time. "There is an air about it resonant of joy and hope: it 
speaks with a thousand tongues to the heart; it waves its mighty 
shadow over the imagination: ... its streets are paved with the 
names of learning that can never wear out: its green quadrangles 
breathe the silence of thought, conscious of the weight of yearnings 
innumerable after the past, of loftiest aspirations for the future." 

It was this feeling of the intellectual hopes and moral ideas of 
many generations of men here made visible in stone, rather than 
what has been called the "almost despairing sense of loveliness," 
that stirred me profoundly as I walked from court to court in the 
expressive silence of the long vacation. It was a feeling good and 
salutary for the heart. Yet in the end the impression left upon me 
was curiously mixed. I was elated and teased at the same time; 
my spirits were, so to speak, both enlarged and contracted. In 
part this was due, no doubt, to the manifest incongruities of the 
town itself as it has developed in these latter years. From the 

'Address before the Michigan Schoolmasters' Club at Ann Arbor, Michigan, 
April 4, 1913. 



2 THE SCHOOL REVIEW 

mediaeval seclusion of a quadrangle one steps into a street now 
bustling with modern shops and a very unmediaeval throng of 
shoppers. Only a little while ago, in Matthew Arnold's day, " the 
pleasant country still ran up to the walls and gates of the colleges ; 
no fringe of mean or commonplace suburbs interposed between the 
coronal of spires and towers and its green setting." But now, if 
the visitor, with his mind filled with the lonely religious wrestlings 
of Newman, would walk out to IfHey and Littlemore, he must pass 
through long rows of vulgar and tawdry villas. There is something 
disconcerting in these inharmonious contrasts. And, guided per- 
haps by this discord of the past and the present, one begins to 
be aware of something paradoxical in the beauty and significance of 
the university itself. The very architecture of the place, with all 
its charm, is a kind of anomaly. "True to her character of the home 
of lost causes and impossible loyalties, Oxford clung with a tragic 
desperation to her ancient garments of Gothic pattern, hugging 
them about her until, worn to rags and tatters, they dropped off, 
and she was constrained to clothe her nakedness with the sole con- 
temporary dress available in the eighteenth century, to wit, that 
sheer Palladianism into which the illusory 'New Birth' movement 
itself had by that time degenerated. Thus it befell that Oxford 
architecture never passed through the normal gamut of successive 
phases of declension from the sixteenth century onward, but that 
between the perfection of English mediaeval masoncraft . . . and 
the corrupt fashion of Trinity, Queen's, and Worcester Colleges, 
. . . there was no intermediate stage but that of the so-called 
'Oxford Gothic' " x 

And this "picturesque hybrid" in building, which is neither 
Renaissance nor mediaeval, neither quite Greek nor quite Christian, 
is symbolical of what Oxford has stood for intellectually and 
morally. With good right one of her own living poets has described 
her as 

.... the mother of celestial moods, 

Who o'er the saints' inviolate array 

Hath starred her robe of fair beatitudes 

With jewels worn by Hellas. 

1 Aymer Vallance, The Old Colleges of Oxford. 



THE PARADOX OF OXFORD 3 

There is, if you stop to think about it, this huge inconsistency, 
underlying the institution of Oxford. It was founded as a monastic 
school to train boys for the priesthood, and its colleges still bear 
something of the outward appearance of cloistered retreats. Until 
well into the last century every matriculant was obliged to subscribe 
to the Thirty-nine Articles, and still today the policy of the uni- 
versity is largely controlled by a Convocation of black-robed priests 
who come up from their country parishes with the zeal of the 
church burning in their breasts. Yet education at Oxford, though 
it was at the first directed to monkish ends and though until 
very recently it retained a good deal of that scholastic coloring, 
was from an early date, if not from the beginning, crossed with 
Pagan ideals. Aristotle was held to be an authority in morals 
by the side of St. Augustine, prayers were offered to Jehovah when 
Olympian Zeus was in the heart of the worshiper, and boys were 
taught, are still taught, to mold their emotions at once to the 
modes of the Psalms and of Horace. 

This is what I have meant by the classical paradox of Oxford, 
giving it that name not because this inconsistency is peculiar to the 
university, but because there more than anywhere else it is driven 
into the imagination by the teasing charm of a petrified and glori- 
fied tradition. It is indeed, if we look below the surface of things, 
deeply imbedded in the foundations of our whole modern life and 
points far back to that Hellenistic civilization in which the ideals of 
Greece and the Orient were mingled to produce the new world. To 
explain what I mean by this questionable but very fruitful union, I 
cannot do better than quote a few sentences from the little treatise 
of Lucian called The Wisdom of Nigrinus. We have in this dialogue 
the story of a visit to a philosopher of the second century of our era 
who styled himself a Platonist, a denizen of Rome but probably 
enough, like his friend Lucian, a child of Asia. One of the persons 
of the dialogue, having been in Rome, reports thus the philosopher's 
own account of his mode of life: 

Choosing thereby a sort of life which seems to most people womanish 
and spiritless, I converse with Plato, Philosophy, and Truth, and seating myself, 
as it were, high up in a theater full of untold thousands, I look down on what 
takes place, which is of a quality sometimes to afford amusement and laughter, 



4 THE SCHOOL REVIEW 

sometimes to prove a man's true steadfastness One has cause to admire 

philosophy when he beholds so much folly, and to despise the gifts of fortune 
when he sees on the stage of life a play of many roles, in which one man enters 

first as servant, then as master; another first as rich, then as poor I 

have said that there is food for laughter and amusement in what goes on; let 
me now explain it. To begin with, are not the rich ridiculous? They dis- 
play their purple gowns and show their rings and betray an unbounded lack 

of taste Far more ridiculous, however, than the rich are those who 

visit them and pay them court. They get up at midnight, run all about the 
city, let servants bolt the doors in their faces, and suffer themselves to be called 
dogs, toadies, and similar names. By way of reward for this galling round of 
visits they get the much-talked-of dinner, a vulgar thing, the source of many 
evils. [Translated by A. M. Harmon.] 

All this, the visitor goes on to say, seemed to Nigrinus quite 
ludicrous. And further, he reports, Nigrinus 

made special mention of people who cultivate philosophy for hire and put 

virtue on sale over a counter For he maintained that one who intends 

to teach contempt of wealth should first of all show that he is himself above 

gain. Certainly he used to put these principles into practice So far 

was he from coveting the property of others that even when his own property 

was going to rack and ruin he did not concern himself about it He made 

no secret of his condemnation of the sort of philosophers who think it a course 
in virtue if they train the young to endure "full many pains and toils," the 
majority recommending cold baths, though some whip them, and still others, 
the more refined of their sort, scrape the surface of their skin with a knife- 
blade. 

As for the visitor to Nigrinus, he himself tells the strange effect 
of the philosopher's words upon him. 

In a great fit of confusion and giddiness [he says], I dripped with sweat, 
I stumbled and stuck in the endeavor to speak, my voice failed, my tongue 

faltered, and finally I began to cry in embarrassment My wound was 

deep and vital, and his words, shot with great accuracy, clove, if I may say so, 
my very soul in twain. 

This, it is almost necessary to observe, is not a scene of conver- 
sion from Wesley's Diary, but is a page from the book of one who, 
more perhaps than any other writer of his age, was steeped in the 
traditional learning of Greece. Yet what a change! How far we 
have got from Pindar's song of "wisdom blooming in the soul," 
from his praise of the man who, because death awaits at the end, 
will not "sit vainly in the dark through a dull and nameless age, 



THE PARADOX OF OXFORD 5 

and without lot in noble deeds," and from his glorification of those 
upon whom, for their reverence of things divine in the hour of 
triumph, "the pleasant lyre and the sweet pipe shed their grace"! 
We have gone a great way from Aristotle's notion of the magnani- 
mous man, the jueyaXo^uxos, who in winning the world has won 
also his own soul. And even if, formally, the ideal of Nigrinus can 
in a way be connected with Plato's contrast of the visible and 
invisible worlds, yet the animus, so to speak, of the new wisdom 
is something very different from that which heartened men in the 
garden of the Athenian Academy. In place of the philosopher who, 
seeking the vision of the gods, still kept in his heart the fair and 
happy things of Hellas, and who, knowing the emptiness of life's 
rewards, was nevertheless ready to serve and govern the state, we 
now have one who regards it as the highest goal of life to sit in a 
kind of idle abstraction from the world and hypnotize himself with 
the wisdom of his lord. This new race of philosophers indeed, 
whom Lucian eulogizes on one page and ridicules on another, are 
but bearded monks who have not learned the name of their real 
master; they speak the words of Athens, but with barbarous images 
in their souls. Their denial of practical life will be known through 
the Middle Ages as the contemptus mundi, and already one sees how 
their asceticism and their praise of poverty divide them harshly 
into saints and hypocrites not entirely unlike those of the cloister. 
There is an emotional difference between the philosophers of the 
Hellenistic world and the monks of the Christian world, due largely 
no doubt to the fact that the former still confessed the Socratic 
doctrine, however they may have distorted it, whereas the latter 
honestly subjected it to what they regarded as a higher revelation. 
Yet the paradox still troubles the new religion. The basis of edu- 
cation, in language entirely and to no small extent in ideas, remains 
Greek and Latin, however the superstructure may be Christian and 
oriental. Nor were the Fathers and rulers of the church unaware 
of this; their trick of decrying Pagan literature is due in no small 
part to a feeling of uneasy dependence on it for their knowledge and 
philosophy. They would use it and at the same time spurn it under 
their feet as they reached up to the celestial wisdom. So in a 
comment on a verse in Kings: "But all the Israelites went down 



6 THE SCHOOL REVIEW 

to the Philistines, to sharpen every man his share, his coulter, 
and his axe," Gregory the Great, or some other, applies the words 
to the contrast between the classical tradition and the new faith. 

We go down to the Philistines [he says] when we incline the mind to secular 
studies; Christian simplicity is upon a height. Secular books are said to be 
in the plain since they have no celestial truths. God put secular knowledge 
in a plain before us that we should use it as a step to ascend to the heights of 
Scripture. So Moses first learned the wisdom of the Egyptians that he might 
be able to understand and expound the divine precepts; Isaiah, most eloquent 
of the prophets, was nobiliter instructus et urbanus; and Paul had sat at Gama- 
liel's feet before he was lifted to the height of the third heaven. One goes to the 
Philistines to sharpen one's plow, because secular learning is needed as a train- 
ing for Christian preaching. 1 

But if mediaeval man, in general, was ready to accept the Pagan 
tradition as a mere treasure of the Philistines to be plundered for 
the benefit of the chosen people, there were those also who made 
a brave attempt to effect a reconciliation — always, of course, ad 
majorem Dei gloriam. The most notable of these efforts is the 
stupendous Summa of St. Thomas Aquinas, in which the newly 
recovered philosophy of Aristotle is welded into Christian doctrine 
to make a vast body of theology. The words of the Philosopher 
(no other name is needed to designate Aristotle, as the master of 
those that know) and sentences of the Fathers are quoted together 
without distinction as if they were of one and the same authority. 
But, despite the admirable patience and inexhaustible cunning of the 
Angelic Doctor, an instructed reader can go through his work and 
distinguish the two elements of which his system is composed, as 
we can separate the two metals of an alloy; there is no chemical 
compound here, but a mechanical mixture. The distinction can be 
made visible to the eyes by turning to Dante, whose allegory of the 
future is based frankly on the Summa of St. Thomas. There is 
significance in the very guides who carry the pilgrim through hell 
and purgatory up to the celestial sphere. In the first two realms, 
Virgil, the bearer of the classical tradition, is sufficient, but when the 
poet from the earthly Paradise is about to mount to the heavenly 
Paradise and the vision of God he needs the help of Beatrice, who 
is the symbol and voice of theology. 

1 From H. O. Taylor, The Mediaeval Mind. 



THE PARADOX OF OXFORD 7 

When we pass from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance we 
find two notable movements aiming at an elimination of this 
inherited inconsistency. One of these may be called the Pagan 
revival. It was nothing less than an effort to surmount the 
difficulty by throwing away the moral ideals of both Christianity 
and classicism and clinging to the purely natural and imaginative 
aspects of the ancient world in what came to be regarded as Pagan- 
ism. Not a little of the art and literature of Italy is of that utterly 
non-moral sort. The other movement undertook to reconcile 
Greek philosophy and Christianity in a synthesis which should 
embrace the higher and, in this differing from the work of St. 
Thomas, the less dogmatic elements of each. This was the half- 
avowed purpose of the Cambridge Platonists, a noble ambition 
which somehow, owing perhaps to the absence of any great genius 
among them, they just failed to achieve. Their failure was the 
tragedy of the age, and left the task still to be accomplished, if, 
indeed, it can in any way be accomplished. 

It may seem that I am dwelling over much on a commonplace; 
yet I doubt if we often realize how deeply this discrepancy lies 
imbedded in our modern civilization. Certainly the knowledge 
of it came to me last summer at Oxford with the force almost of 
discovery. And I remember the hour and the place of the awaken- 
ing. It was one gray day in the quadrangle of Oriel College, as I 
stood, by the entrance to the Common Room looking up at the 
windows of what had been the rooms of John Henry Newman. 
In that college the Oxford Movement had its inception and passed 
away. The little group of scholars who in the Common Room 
met together and discussed the meaning of religion and the office 
of the church were men trained and steeped in Aristotle and the 
other classics; they never lost that discipline, yet their whole 
endeavor was to bring back the mediaeval interpretation of life. 
An amusing incident of this tendency is connected with Dr. Hamp- 
den's Bampton Lectures on scholastic philosophy, delivered in 
1832, and afterward published. No one in Oxford read the book, 
not even Newman who wrote against it, and no one there had read 
any scholastic philosophy, says Mr. Mozley, who ought to know; 
he even declares that the book is unreadable, and I, for one, have 



8 THE SCHOOL REVIEW 

taken his word for it. Yet the rumor got about that Dr. Hampden 
was trying to undermine the authority of mediaeval tradition, 
and the horror and hubbub were enormous. The situation became 
at least anomalous when Hampden, though Regius Professor of 
Divinity, was deprived of his place on the board that chose the 
Select Preachers for the University. 

These things came to my mind as I stood in the quiet quad- 
rangle of Oriel, and then I remembered the life of the man who must 
so often in moments of perplexity have looked out of the windows 
over my head, gathering from this very scene comfort and strength 
for his battle with the world. Newman, if anyone, was the very 
embodiment of the Oxford spirit, and if we think of his great 
struggle as a hesitation between the Anglican and Roman churches, 
it was, in a deeper sense, the agony of an intuitive soul caught in 
the dilemma of the two traditions of which the very stones of his 
college with their hybrid architecture, neither Renaissance nor 
Gothic, are a symbol. How thoroughly his mind was endued with 
the humanistic spirit, how much the great poets of antiquity meant 
to him, may be known from one of his famous paragraphs, one 
of the supreme things of our speech: 

Let us consider, too, how differently young and old are affected by the 
words of some classic author, such as Homer or Horace. Passages, which to 
a boy are but rhetorical commonplaces, neither better nor worse than a hundred 
others, which any clever writer might supply, which he gets by heart and thinks 
very fine, and imitates, as he thinks, successfully, in his own flowing versification, 
at length come home to him, when long years have passed, and he has had 
experience of life, and pierce him, as if he had never before known them, with 
their sad earnestness and vivid exactness. Then he comes to understand how 
it is that lines, the birth of some chance morning or evening at an Ionian festival, 
or among the Sabine hills, have lasted generation after generation, for thousands 
of years, with a power over the mind, and a charm which the current literature 
of his own day, with all its obvious advantages, is utterly unable to rival. 
Perhaps this is the reason of the mediaeval opinion about Virgil, as of a prophet 
or a magician; his single words and phrases, his pathetic half-lines, giving 
utterance, as the voice of Nature herself, to that pain and weariness, yet hope 
of better things, which is the experience of her children in every time. 

That is the purest humanism. It is the classic tradition carried 
in a mind fitted by nature and by long training to live in the clear 
air of the antique world. It is, or was until yesterday, the finest 



THE PARADOX OF OXFORD g 

flower of our education. It characterizes the more open nurture 
of the Anglican church. Yet all this Newman was to surrender, 
borne away by the narrower and intenser current of mediaevalism, 
to his own and our incalculable loss. You may hear his recantation 
in the chapter on "Christianity and Letters" in The Idea of a 
University: 

And while we thus recur to Greece and Athens with pleasure and affection, 
and recognize in that famous land the source and the school of intellectual 
culture, it would be strange indeed if we forgot to look further south also, and 
there to bow before a more glorious luminary, and a more sacred oracle of 
truth, and the source of another sort of knowledge, high and supernatural, 
which is seated in Palestine. Jerusalem is the fountain-head of religious 
knowledge, as Athens is of secular. 

The English priest's language is suaver than was that of the 
Italian pope from whom I have already quoted but beneath the 
surface he is saying nothing different from the haughty and rude 
Gregory: "One goes to the Philistines to sharpen one's plow, 
because secular learning is needed as a training for Christian 
preaching." 

This, then, is the paradox of Oxford. It is a thing of the past, 
you will say, and came to end soon after the departure of Newman 
for his spiritual Rome. So in a way it is, and there's the pity of it. 
The world could not forever rest the higher elements of its civiliza- 
tion on ideas which are mutually destructive: on the one side the 
human ideal of development through self-control in accordance with 
the law of the Golden Mean, on the other that of salvation through 
self -surrender and ascetic virtue; and in these latter years, having 
freed ourselves from unquestioning submission to authority, we have 
eased ourselves of the difficulty of reconciling the two traditions by 
throwing over the past altogether as a criterion of life. The classics 
have pretty well gone, and if we study them at all it is as if they were 
dead languages, useful it may be as a gymnastic discipline for the 
mind, but with little or no sense that they contain a body of human 
experience and tried wisdom by which we may still guide our steps 
as we stumble upon the dark ways of this earth. And so, how- 
ever bur churches may lift their spires into the air and however 
our priests may repeat the sacrifice of the Eucharist, for the world 



IO THE SCHOOL REVIEW 

at large the mediaeval meaning of atonement and the binding 
force of these symbols have been forgotten or are fast forgetting; 
some consolation they may give and some hope they may offer, 
but it is largely through their aesthetic appeal, and the law of 
God is not in them. In place of the secular tradition of the 
classics we have turned to science, and in place of obedience to the 
will of God we are seeking for salvation in humanitarian sympathy 
with our brother men. And these things are well in their way, 
but they do not supply and can never supply the comfort and 
elevation of the other disciplines. Science, with all its perspicacity, 
can see no place within its scheme for what is after all the heart 
of humanity and the source of true humanism — the consciousness 
of something within us that stands apart from material law and 
guides itself to ends of happiness and misery which do not belong 
to nature. And humanitarianism, however it may be concerned 
with human destinies and however it may call upon our emotions, 
leaves out of account the deep thirst of the soul for the infinite wells 
of peace; it has forgotten the scriptural promise of peace and the 
truth which St. Augustine knew: Quia fecisti nos ad te et inquietum 
est cor nostrum, donee requiescat in te — ■' 'For thou hast made us for 
thyself, and our heart cannot be quieted until it resteth in thee." 
No, there is a great lack in our life today, which we feel and 
secretly acknowledge to ourselves, despite much bragging of progress 
and much outward scorn of the things we have cast away. I shall 
not expatiate now on this fact, of which many, if not all, of you are 
at bottom, I think, as fully conscious as I am. At any rate time 
and the occasion force me to take it for granted, and to beg your 
consideration of the means at our disposal for restoring what has 
been lost. And first of all there can be no sound restoration unless 
we can escape that paradox of civilization symbolized by the stones 
of Oxford. Now one relief from the dilemma is obvious and sure: 
we can sacrifice one of the opposing traditions entirely and cling to 
the other. And for my part, if it is necessary, I am ready to throw 
overboard all that has come to us from the Middle Ages. The gain 
for education would in some directions be clear and immediate. 
To leave Anglo-Saxon to a few specialists and to cut it out of the 
common curriculum designed for discipline and culture would have 



THE PARADOX OF OXFORD II 

happy results in the study of English; to waive the remote and 
doubtful benefits of Gothic and the old Romance dialects for Goethe 
and Racine and others who carried on the classical tradition would 
be a fruitful saving of time. 

No doubt there would be a great loss also to reckon with in such 
a choice. If nothing else, the religious literature of the age is 
a vast storehouse of intense and purifying passion from which each 
of us may draw and supply the lack in his individual emotions. 
You remember the scene at Ostia on the Tiber, when Augustine 
with his mother, who was now approaching the end of this life, 
stood alone together at the window looking into a garden, and 
talked of the things that are to be. And at the last of their speech 
they turned to the joy that should ravish the soul and swallow it up, 
when the tumults of the flesh were silenced, and the images of the 
earth and the waters and the air were silenced, and the poles 
of the sky were silent, and the very heart grew still to itself, and 
all dreams and visionary revelations, and every tongue and every 
sign were hushed in silence; and as they thus spoke the rapture 
of heaven came so near that this world was lost for them in con- 
tempt — et mundus iste nobis inter verba vilesceret cum omnibus 
delectationibus suis. That is the deep emotion that was passed 
from man to man and from soul to soul through the devastations 
of the Middle Ages, and with it the ecstatic cry of the saintly 
mother, Quid hie facio, "What do I here?" For those who have 
not imprisoned themselves in the life of the present, the sermons of 
St. Bernard, the great prayers and hymns of the church, even the 
austere dialectic of Thomas Aquinas, are a reservoir from which we 
may still draw that celestial and intoxicating drink. There are some 
of us — I confess that I myself am such a one — for whom, because of 
temperament or training, the closing of that source would mean 
an irreparable loss. Yet we are so impressed by a greater need of 
the world, that we are ready to lay iconoclastic hands on the 
whole fabric of the Middle Ages and to sweep it away altogether, 
with all its good and all its evil. It may be that no such harsh 
procedure is necessary. Indeed, as I have said, the mediaeval 
tradition, so far as our schools are concerned, has come to have so 
little vital force, it is so much a mere cadaver for the seminar, that 



12 THE SCHOOL REVIEW 

in advocating its elimination from the common curriculum, we 
shall scarcely be doing violence to anything useful or sacred. It 
is possible, furthermore, that, if ever we have another renaissance 
in our education and the past is taken up again as a living and 
creative power in the imagination, some means may be discovered 
to effect that reconciliation between the classical and mediaeval 
views which the earlier Renaissance desired but could not find. 

But that is more or less chimerical. What lies at our hands, 
and what I believe thoughtful men are more and more beginning to 
recognize as imperative for our higher intellectual and artistic life, 
is a clear understanding of the paradoxical nature of the bases upon 
which education has until recently stood, with the consequences 
thereof, and a return, if possible, to pure classical tradition and 
discipline. I am aware that this recognition is still of a vague 
and ineffective sort, while in practice Greek is certainly losing 
ground day by day and Latin is scarcely gaining. But a good deal 
of futile-seeming talk has before now preceded an actual revolution, 
and who shall say that the tide may not turn at any hour and the 
classics which we praise and neglect may not almost suddenly step 
into their own again ? At any rate it behooves those who are now 
teaching Greek and Latin, with a feeling of despair perhaps, to lay 
to heart what hope they can, and to make sure that, when the 
change comes, if it do indeed come, they may be found ready and 
fully prepared to give the world what it needs. Meanwhile they 
have a plain task and duty. It may seem vague and impractical 
to talk of maintaining a tradition for some future change in the 
whole trend of a civilization; there is at least something clear and 
close at hand which the teacher can do, and which may confer a 
benefit upon himself and upon what earnest pupils he has. 

In the first place, those who are teaching can effect a certain 
reform in their methods. We have gained a good deal from German 
scholarship, but we have also lost something. Let us, if we can, 
retain the diligence and accuracy which have come from the 
German seminar, but let us remember that the tendency of the 
past century has been to make of the classics a closed field for the 
investigating specialist and to draw the attention away from their 
value as a literary discipline containing an imperishable criticism 



THE PARADOX OF OXFORD 13 

of life. That evil has been recognized, and we are trying to remedy 
it. But at the present time we may be led astray by what may seem 
in itself a peculiar advantage to the classicist — I mean the dis- 
covery of a vast body of Greek writing which lies, so to speak, on 
the outskirts of literature, and the unearthing of great archaeological 
treasures. These things are undoubtedly good in themselves, and 
they may be used to give a vividness and reality to ancient life 
such as we have never had. But they contain also a real danger. 
After all, these inscriptions and discoveries scarcely touch on what 
is the vital classical tradition — the interpretation of the human 
heart and those glimpses into the destinies for which we go to 
Homer and Sophocles and Plato and Lucretius and Virgil. It is 
possible that archaeology may throw the emphasis on the wrong 
place and obscure the true issues. I say then, with due deference 
to those who have more authority to speak than I have, that the 
first thing to do is to see that archaeology, valuable and interesting 
as it is, be kept in its proper relative place, and be not allowed to 
dazzle our eyes by the wonder of its discoveries. 

What we need chiefly is a deeper knowledge and finer under- 
standing of those few authors who are really the classics. We need 
to reassure ourselves that as pure human literature they still stand 
supreme and unapproached. I for one am ready to avow my opin- 
ion, and I believe that no great advance in the classics is possible 
until this belief is proclaimed boldly and generally, that the Iliad 
and Odyssey have a beauty and humanity that no modern epic 
poet has ever touched — not Milton himself, though I adore Milton 
this side idolatry. There is no lyric poetry in modern tongues that 
has the music and exquisite feeling of Sappho's Lesbian songs, or 
the soaring strength of Pindar's impassioned vision. No one else 
has ever quite caught again the mellow suavity of Horace. No 
later philosopher has translated the eternal verities into such perfect 
speech as Plato. I have seen Edwin Booth in Lear and Macbeth 
and Hamlet, and felt the grip of Shakespeare at my very heart. But 
I have seen a band of young amateurs present the Agamemnon in 
the Stadium at Harvard, and through the crudeness of their acting 
and the helplessness of the chorus and the disadvantage of a lan- 
guage I could scarcely follow, I still knew that here was a higher 



14 THE SCHOOL REVIEW 

form of drama than anything on the modern stage, and that the 
art of Aeschylus was profounder and more everlasting in its emo- 
tional appeal than Shakespeare's even. 

The teacher who desires to impress his pupils with the value and 
greatness of classical literature must first feel those qualities himself. 
He may, perhaps, think that my estimation of the ancient poets is 
relatively overdrawn, though I mean to speak only my sober con- 
viction, but he must at least read those poets, read and read, and 
steep his mind in their images and phrases. But it is even more 
important, as things now are, that he should ponder the ideas 
that underlie the ancient poets and philosophers, their ethical inter- 
pretation of individual and social experience, not only as these ideas 
are expressed directly and didactically, but more particularly in 
that glancing and suggestive manner which Matthew Arnold 
meant to convey in his phrase " the criticism of life." For, frankly, 
if a man is not convinced that the classics contain a treasure of 
practical and moral wisdom which is imperatively needed as a 
supplement to the one-sided theories of the present day and as a 
corrective of much that is distorted in our views, he had better 
take up some other subject to teach than Greek or Latin. The 
subject is too large and debatable to deal with in a paragraph. 
But two famous stanzas from Wordsworth and Coleridge, who did 
more than any other poets to fashion the higher ethical feeling of 
the age, may give a hint of where the discussion would lead. You 
may guess the stanza from Wordsworth: 

One impulse from a vernal wood 

May teach you more of man, 
Of moral evil and of good, 

Than all the sages can. 

Literally taken the idea of these lines is, of course, sheer humbug, 
and Wordsworth no doubt wrote them in a vein of playfulness; 
but after all they agree with a good deal of the easy philosophy of 
the century, and they are the precise poetical equivalent of the 
scientific study of nature which has displaced the humanities. 
The other stanza is from The Ancient Mariner: 

He prayeth best, who loveth best 

All things both great and small; 
For the dear God who loveth us, 

He made and loveth all. 



THE PARADOX OF OXFORD 15 

The sentiment, you will say, is innocent and pious enough, but it 
points unmistakably to the other tendency of the day, that humani- 
tarian notion of indistinguishing sympathy which is rapidly becom- 
ing the religion of the people and the theme of serious literature 
to the exclusion of other ideals. Now, it is perfectly plain that the 
whole influence of classical literature is against the exaggeration 
of these naturalistic and humanitarian tendencies. Consider 
the meaning of one of Pindar's odes, or of Horace's epistles, or 
reflect on the ethics of Aristotle; the emphasis is everywhere on 
distinctions and judgment in place of sympathy, and on the grave 
responsibility of the individual man for the conduct of his own soul. 
Bacchylides in one brief memorable phrase has summed up the 
wisdom of his people: 6<na hp&v ev<ppcuve dvfxbv — "doing what is 
right in the eyes of heaven, make glad your soul." Unless the 
teacher is convinced that the pregnant meaning of those words 
may be used, and should be used, as a corrective of the natural- 
istic and humanitarian exaggerations of our day, he had better 
devote his energy to some other subject. 

I am assuming, you see, that the classics contain in themselves 
an ideal capable of relieving us from the undue predominance of 
both the scientific philosophy and the humanitarianism of the 
day, but some of you may raise a doubt at this point. It is clear, 
you will say, that the humanism of the classics may be used to offset 
the inhumanity of our scientific absorption, but what have they to 
offer to balance the humanitarian absorption in comfort and the 
things of this world ? How can they alone give us back what we 
have lost with the disappearance of the mediaeval belief in the 
infinite, omnipotent deity. This question has been forced upon my 
mind by reading a book from Oxford, by Mr. R. W. Livingstone, in 
support of the classical propaganda. Formerly it seemed sufficient 
to dwell on the aesthetic superiority of Greek art and literature, 
but of recent years that appeal has been reinforced by an attempt to 
set forth the ethical and practical value of Greek ideas for men today 
in the distraction of our own civilization. And so Mr. Livingstone 
calls his volume of essays "The Greek Genius and Its Meaning to 
Us." The change is well, and may have its effect in time, though 
at present the new appeal may seem to fall on deaf ears. 



16 THE SCHOOL REVIEW 

Mr. Livingstone is right also in seeing that the crux of the matter 
is in the sense to be attached to the word "humanism." "There 
are few more important problems than this," he declares: "is 
humanism right? Is it right to take a purely human attitude 
towards life, to assume that man is the measure of all things, and 
to believe that, even though the unseen may be there, still we 
can know our duty and live our life without reference to it ? That 
is perhaps the biggest question of the present day." The problem, 
so far as it goes, could not be stated more vigorously, and no 
one can read Mr. Livingstone's exposition of Greek humanism 
without pleasure and enlargement of mind. Yet in the end it is 
not quite plain that he has grasped the full force of the word. 
Certain writers, among whom not the least guilty is Professor 
Schiller, a philosophical Fellow of his own college, Corpus Christi, 
have deliberately clouded the meaning of "humanism" by con- 
fusing it with "humanitarianism," which is in fact its very opposite, 
and it is not clear that Mr. Livingstone, who may be taken as the 
spokesman of a common tendency among scholars, has escaped 
entirely from this entanglement. His praise of the Sophists as the 
true exponents of humanism, his acceptance of Nietzsche's sharp 
distinction between the Dionysian and Apollonian aspects of 
Greek civilization, his emphasis of the exotic side of Plato, and his 
rejection of Sophocles as the norm of Athenian genius are sufficient 
at least to raise a doubt in one's mind. "Man is the measure of 
all things" — no doubt that is humanism; it rejects the unseen 
and the infinite in so far as these are conceived to be superhuman 
or antihuman, and in this way it is antagonistic to the whole scope 
of mediaevalism; it rejects the superhuman, and, in a sense, the 
supernatural, but he is far from understanding its full scope who 
supposes that it necessarily excludes also the higher, even the 
divine, elements of the human soul itself. The error is not new. 
The Greeks gave us the sense of beauty, is an old saying, but they 
did so by limiting themselves to the finite laws of harmony and 
proportion; as a Compensation the Middle Ages gave us the con- 
trasted sense of the infinite. The most eloquent and authoritative 
expression of this view is Renan's famous Prayer on the Acropolis, 
in his Souvenirs d'enfance et de jeunesse. Standing on that citadel 



THE PARADOX OF OXFORD 17 

of the old Athenian faith, with the marvelous ruins of the Parthenon 
before his eyes, he uttered, in words you will remember, his adora- 
tion of the Goddess Athena: 

O nobility! O simple and true beauty! Deity whose cult signifies 
reason and wisdom, thou whose temple is an eternal lesson in conscience and 
sincerity, I come late to the threshold of thy mysteries. To find thee there were 
needed for me endless studies. The invitation which thou gavest to the 
Athenian at his birth with a smile, I have conquered only by reflection and at 
the price of long labor 

Dost thou remember that day, under the archonship of Dionysodorus, 
when a little ugly Jew, speaking the Greek of Syria, came hither, passed over 
thy sacred place, red thy inscriptions without understanding, and found in 
thy enclosure an altar, as he thought, dedicated to the unknown God ? Ah well, 
this little Jew has won the day; for a thousand years thou, O Truth, wast 
treated as an idol; for a thousand years the world was a desert wherein no 

flower grew Goddess of order, image of the steadfastness of heaven, 

to love thee was accounted a sin, and today, now that by painful toil we have 
come nearer to thee, we are accused of committing a crime against the spirit 
of man 

The world shall not be saved except it return to thee and repudiate its 
barbarian bonds. 

So far our scholar goes in his praise of the spotless and radiant 
beauty of Athena, and then, as the surge of mediaevalism flows 
back upon him, he turns to its symbol in the great vault of St. 
Sophia at Byzantium with a cry of homesickness: "A great wave 
of forgetfulness carries us into a gulf without name. O abyss, 
thou art the only God!" (0 abime, tu es le Dieu unique!). 

Now the application of this contrast between orderly finite 
beauty and the infinite conceived as a formless abyss, this opposi- 
tion of the human and the divine, is doubly false. The Greeks have 
had no monopoly of the sense of beauty on the one hand, and on 
the other hand their submission to the laws of harmony by no means 
excludes that religious exaltation which we call, for lack of a better 
name, the infinite. Their great creation, their unique contribution 
to the world, was just the union of beauty and religious exaltation 
in forms which remain normally human — that, indeed, is humanism 
in the highest meaning of the word. If a man doubts the unique- 
ness of this gift he can easily persuade himself by looking at the 
Elgin marbles, which stood once on the Parthenon before which 



18 THE SCHOOL REVIEW 

Renan uttered his prayer, and comparing them with what he may 
see elsewhere of art and . religious decoration. It is, more par- 
ticularly, a dull soul that can stand before those weather-worn 
blocks of stone, commonly called the Three Fates, or even look upon 
their pictured likeness, and not feel, along with their wonder of 
sheer beauty, the strange lift and thrill of emotion, the mystery 
of deep opening within the heart to deep, which Renan professed 
to feel before the abime. There are endless treasures of beauty that 
owe nothing to Greece, there are, on the other hand, idols and 
temples everywhere which strike the beholder with awe; but this 
human sublimity will scarcely be found, or if found, whether in the 
Western Renaissance or in the Buddhistic art of the Far East, can 
be traced somehow to the influence of Greece. Wherever this 
influence has not passed, you will see a divorce between measured 
human beauty and religious exaltation, and an attempt to express 
the infinite by symbols that are either exaggerated or grotesque or 
merely vague. The Hindu who wishes to image the divine wisdom 
will carve an idol with many heads, or if he wishes to set forth the 
divine power, will give to his god a hundred arms. The men of the 
Middle Ages knew well enough what is beautiful, but when they 
undertook to visualize the saint they made hiiri meager and 
unlovely. Even the cathedrals seek the impression of sublimity 
by spaces and lines that overwhelm the worshiper with the sense 
of his littleness; they may be beautiful, but they are not human. 
Goethe could create beauty, but when, in his romantic and mediae- 
val mood, he thought of the power which speaks to us so humanly 
in the Three Fates he could only express it in the vague and 
grotesque symbolism of the mystic Mothers. 

The true humanism, which speaks in the stones of the Parthenon, 
does not possess authority and saving power because the human 
is there regarded as excluding the divine, but the very contrary. 
The Elgin marbles merely put into visible form the philosophy of 
Plato, who was ready to follow as a god any man who knew how 
to combine in his conduct the law of the one and the law of the 
many; they express the same truth which Aristotle taught in his 
Ethics, that virtue is the golden mean of self-control rather than 
any excess of self-sacrifice, but that the golden mean is rightly 



THE PARADOX OF OXFORD 



19 



known only to him who desires in contemplation to behold the 
unmoved, all-moving unity. If we forget this composite meaning 
of humanism, we shall confuse it either with the hard, dry formalism 
of the pseudo-classics, or with the sentiment of modern humani- 
tarianism. 

I do not presume to say that the opposition between the classical 
and mediaeval traditions may not in some way be reconciled, or 
that the paradox to which I have been calling your attention is 
forever insoluble. But I am sure that for those who believe that 
no great art and no sure comfort for the questing human spirit 
can come from an education based overwhelmingly on science and 
humanitarianism, and who hope for a regeneration of the vivifying 
ideals of the past — I am sure that for such as these the one practical 
course is to steep their own minds in the great and proved writers 
of the ancient world, to nourish their inner life on that larger 
humanism which embraces the spiritual as well as the aesthetic 
needs of mankind, and then, if they be teachers of the classics, 
simply to teach as they can, omitting nothing of rigid discipline, 
however repellent that discipline may be, but giving also to the 
pupil from the overflowing fulness of their faith and joy. 



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